Dear Digby

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  I stood still, shaking. The room was perfectly silent. I reached over the desk and touched his cuff. “Good-bye, Father.”

  He touched my hand.

  Six weeks later he was dead of a heart attack in Da Nang. They flew the body back, and at the funeral, after the rifle salute, when they took the flag from the casket, as it lowered, and folded it and placed it in my mother’s hands, I wept with the others. And I stayed by the grave a long time, weeping.

  For my father.

  For my country.

  For me, fearless Willis Digby. His son.

  Five

  MINNIE W-W-G BUZZED me on the intercom. “Someone here to see you at the front desk, Digby.”

  “Well, who is it?” I buzzed back testily. Ever since Minnie had settled her hyphenation problems, she’d been fabulously inefficient on the job—leafing through Vogue, sucking on low-fat yogurt pops, endlessly doing her nails.

  “Ummmmmmm—jussasec, I’ll check.”

  I was a bit cautious about whom I “saw” in Reception. Since I’d begun answering the more imaginative letters, I’d gotten a few visitors. One was a guy who insisted on meeting me because (he said) he’d had my handwriting analyzed and had been told by the graphologist that I was “multi-orgasmic,” and he wanted to date me. Also, Dino Pedrelli had stopped by a few times, asking for me. I did not want to powwow with that gentleman either.

  “Well?” I buzzed again.

  Minnie fumbled back on. “She says her name is Moose. No, no. Moss, Iris Moss.”

  “Just a second, I’ll get right back to you.”

  Now what? Jesus, what if she had a gun, or worse? The possibilities of how Iris Moss might stock a personal arsenal were paralyzing to consider. What if she wanted to blow up SIS? I mean, she did think that I was entering her sleep under false pretenses. She was obviously here on a mission. I looked over at Holly’s office. She was just coming out, brushing her hair out of her eyes, deep in conversation with Marge Taggart. She looked up and waved. I had told her we needed to talk to these crazy women—I had defended their right to be weird, or worse. I had to go out and face Iris Moss.

  I approached Minnie’s Reception platform (which had a bulletproof bubble she could raise and lower at will)—I wondered momentarily if I could get her to activate it and then let me address Iris on the microphone. I heard animated conversation.

  “… and then I realized that liquid protein is not the answer and is so much less satisfying in terms of food image than even, say, cottage cheese and celery—or yogurt and bran. I mean, those are boring foods, but liquid protein is unconscious food, the kind of food you’d eat if you were a chair.”

  Before Iris spoke, I looked at Minnie. Then I remembered—she’d decided to switch from glasses to contact lenses. She was on a big prewedding physical “make-over” kick—and just that morning she’d had drops put in her eyes at the ophthalmologist’s office for the contact lens test. She was, for all practical visual purposes (like seeing the nose in front of her face) blind. She was working the switchboard by rote.

  “Yes, yes: I know what you mean. At the hos—where I live, we seem to end up with a lot of starchy foods. I’ve gotten very strict about the way I eat. …” A high, oddly fluted voice, with a pronounced speech impediment, she swallowed her “P’s” and “R’s”; she said “stalchy”, “stlict”). “I usually cut all the gristle off my pork chop, and I pick all the raisins out of everything: carrot salad, bran flakes, even ham sauce.”

  “Raisins are fattening?”

  “Oh, I have no idea about that. I just don’t like the way they look. If you think about it, they’re very disgusting looking; they look like something that died, they are something that died—they look like the testicles of a chipmunk who’s been stiff for a few days.”

  I could hear Minnie shifting in her seat at this observation. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I see your point.”

  There was a silence. Mercifully, the phones all began to ring at once. Lights flashed. Minnie went to work.

  “SIS magazine … Hold the line please.”

  “SIS magazine … Same to you, buddy.”

  “SIS magazine … No, you want S.O.S. magazine—the psychology self-help quarterly, not SIS.”

  I stepped out into the garish light of Reception.

  “Hello, Iris?” I put out my hand blindly. My hand closed over hard plastic, a ridged set of fingers. I flinched and jumped back, but the rigid plastic fingers held my hand in a crushing grip—I felt myself being pulled forward slowly by that pressure, and I looked straight into her eyes. She looked like an egg, a darning egg filled with sawdust; she looked stitched together. The hand she gripped mine with was a flesh-colored prosthetic device: five fingers, a hand, a forearm. She was wearing a sort of baggy tunic with elbow-length sleeves, into which the false arm vanished. Her forehead was x’ed with crisscrossed stitches, scars, and her eyes stared out from under shaggy unplucked brows from two different levels: a Picasso face, a Cubist Baseball. Her skin had the texture (and in places, the color) of a strawberry; the nose was broken and rebroken, the mouth a jagged tear, a ripped tin can lid. Her hair was a machine-made, marble-cake Afro, a Supreme’s wig hat.

  “Willis Digby?” she hissed through her sheared labial flap. “Willis Jane Digby?” She had pulled me so close to her that I could feel her breath on my face—it was oddly sweet, babylike, milk-breath. One of the eyes jumped and popped nearly out of its socket, gazing sideways at me.

  “I am Iris Moss. Iris Luckley Moss.”

  The prosthetic fingers were digging into my flesh. I couldn’t breathe or speak.

  “Nerf,” I gasped.

  “What?” She poked one eye very close. “What did you say?”

  “Nervous, I’m a bit ner-vous about meeting you finally.” I pulled my face back from hers—we were locked in a frozen minuet—she pulling me toward her, my entire body retracting, drawing back.

  At last she released my hand, which dropped to my side, bloodless. I put the other hand against the wall to steady myself. This was it—here before me was Horror, Inc. She was a real, breathing, conversing monster. A monster. I saw my corpse laid out on the shag carpet at my feet, huge claw marks across my face.

  “Minnie,” I called hoarsely, realizing even as I called that it was barely a croak and that Minnie, engrossed in the phones, was cheerfully sightless. “Minnie—” I tried again, but what issued from my throat was that sound we all make, midnightmare, somewhere between a growl and a silent scream.

  From the folds of her tunic, beneath which I could see a tropical shirt with interlocking banjos and palm trees and “Laupahoehoe, Hawaii” in wavy script, she brought forth (with a pinch of the prosthetic fingers) a pair of extra-large-size elastic-band women’s underpants. They were patterned with large blue roses.

  “See these?”

  “Uhhhh-yeah. Those are … ah … underpants.”

  “Yes, underpants.” The pop-eyes swiveled about the room and found a half-lit corner.

  “Sit down over there. Sit,” she repeated, and pushed me into the wings with the false arm.

  I dropped down on the couch like a P.O.W., cringing and grinning hysterically.

  She sat down, pushed her face close again.

  “Willis Digby … these are my underpants here, a pair of my underpants. And do you know what they’re stained with?” She shook the underpants up and down.

  “Eeeep.”

  “Eeeep?”

  “No. No. Agh … seminal fluid?”

  “That’s right! That’s correct, Willis Digby! These underpants, my private things, are stained with seminal fluid. Now. Do you know what this is?”

  “Heeerp-o-dermic needle?”

  “Yes. This is a hypodermic needle. Do you know what a needle like this is used for?”

  I gasped.

  “What?”

  “Uh—a syringe? To introduce medication intravenously? For pain or sleep?” I tried to look stern, medical. Maybe if I reminded her of a nurse she�
��d become docile, passive. What was that huge needle for? I shuddered.

  She nodded cautiously. “Yes. Sleep medication. Basil Schrantz did it. He introduced sleep medication into me every night and then used me for his unspeakable, seminal purposes! His job was just to give out the pills at night—I didn’t know that. I thought he was supposed to give me that hypo. He told me it was vitamin serum. He was an orderly!” she shrieked, and the arm shot up by itself, spread into a claw. She got it under control in the nick of time, then pointed one of the fingers at me.

  “I trusted him. But he was no orderly, he was disorderly by night. But you, Willis, you were right. You put me on to him in your letter to me … and I can’t thank you enough.” The hand fluttered to rest on my knee. Relief flooded through my body.

  “He would come in, pretending to give me a little goodnight pill, and then take out this spike, which he had appropriated from Third Floor Diagnostic. He’d stick two hundred cc’s of chloral hydrate into my arm, and then … and then …”

  The fingers clutched my knee.

  “Seminal fluid!” I cried, like a cheerleader.

  “Yes. Seminal fluid. I found it in the morning, every morning in my panties. But I just never thought it could be Basil. He was my friend.”

  The eyes rolled pathetically, and instantly I felt it. What it must be like to live inside that body—to have to distrust every reaction: the false pity, the horror, the embarrassment—till the eyes of the possible friend could see beyond the sutured flesh, the crooked eyes, the ripped mouth.

  “Jesus. Will anyone prosecute? Isn’t this a scandal for the state? I mean, for your place of residence?”

  “For Brookheart State Hospital—yes. It’s a shame, but it will never be a scandal—not if they can help it. They just want it hushed up. They fired Basil Schrantz, of course—then they asked me for the needle—but I wouldn’t give it to them. I know what happens to important evidence when they get hold of it. They say they’re going to hold it for the official investigation—and then, mysteriously, it disappears! Just like that.” She actually snapped two of the plastic fingers—the sound was like a beaded curtain shaking.

  “Therefore”—she rolled the syringe back up in a piece of cheesecloth—“I’m keeping it for myself. Keeping the fingerprints fresh—for the FBI—or the president.”

  I couldn’t help myself; I had to wonder how much of all this was true. “How did you get … When did you arrive here?

  “I just left the hospital. It’s easy enough to do. There are guards, but they’re not very smart. The grounds have no real fences or barred gates.”

  An eye cocked at me. “Do you doubt my story, Willis?”

  “Oh, no. No. I just wondered how you managed to get down here so quickly.”

  “Train. God told me to take the train. She said, ‘Iris, take the train to SIS.’”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, He would. He never cared much about transportation.”

  “And now I can thank you face to face.”

  “You’re welcome. But you did it all yourself, it’s your story. And … after this … what are your plans?”

  What if she wants to stay here, to work here, to see me every day?

  “To go back to Brookheart, of course. I love it there,” she said, with a little frown of surprise. “I’m crazy. I’ll go now, now that I’ve met you and spoken to you.”

  “Well, thank you. I meant what I said in the letter, I’d like to keep in touch, Iris. I feel there’s a reason for us to be regular correspondents, you know?”

  “Yes … I think so. We do have similarities. I mean, finally I believe that all this happened to me because of my looks.”

  I stared at her. Poor woman. Jesus, were there weirdos in this world who specialized in Ugly Love, who preyed on the deformed?

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yes. A woman of my looks has to be very careful. I mean, I almost don’t blame Basil Schrantz, as horrible as all this is, for falling for me like that; it happens to me all the time. At first I was going to kill him—as I said in the letter, it would have given me great satisfaction. In fact, I was standing over him with a letter opener, after I gave him the karate chop. After I smelled the so-called vitamin serum. I wanted him to pay for what he did to me. Then I started thinking about how ridiculous he was, and helpless—helplessly in love with me. I just kicked him, maybe ten times, then I left him for the security people. But you must know about pursuit by men; you’re a pretty girl too, Willis. In fact, I think we look somewhat alike.”

  There was a pause. Each symmetrical eye of my own looked into a separately wandering one of hers.

  “We could be taken for sisters, nearly. Except perhaps for the eyes.”

  “The eyes.”

  “Yes. Mine are so chocolate brown and yours are green.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s a significant resemblance otherwise.”

  “You know, Willis,” she said, “it’s difficult to be a beautiful woman in this world, don’t you think? I mean, for me, apart from this tiny handicap, my arm here, I’m a goddess. But I don’t want to complain too much about that difficulty, about the nagging thousands of would-be lovers, who I spurn because I just don’t want cheap physical love. I mean, I should remind myself how lucky I am, how fortunate. To have this kind of beauty, when others are so deprived.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you … how you lost your arm?”

  She closed both eyes; she looked as if she were about to “recite.”

  “Oh, no, of course not. It was an accident, a freak accident. I was a little girl, nine years old. My mother, my beautiful mother—her hair was bright red and she wore it in a French twist—had taken me to the park to get some ice cream. It was very hot, we wore thin sundresses and white shoes. I remember everything. I remember how cool Mother looked, even though it was scorching—and how she smelled: lily-of-the-valley talcum powder. We stood in line a long time at the ice cream truck—Mr. Yummy, it was. One of the ones that rolls up, opens a window, and serves the whole neighborhood. I remember the music-box chimes playing ‘Beautiful Dreamer.’ It was so hot in line that I started to complain, and my mother said, ‘Iris, don’t fret. It won’t help anything, won’t make it go faster if you fret, will it? Look,’ she said, ‘there’s a little boy who’s crippled and he’s not complaining at all, see? Don’t look right away, but see?’ And I was ashamed of myself, and then it was almost our turn, we were next, and I was thinking about whether I wanted a double-fudge nut or a peach Dreamsicle. I reached up with my right hand, my quarter in my right hand—see?—and looked at the ice-cream man’s face and … Then there was a noise so loud that you couldn’t hear it. You know what I mean? It was like being hit by an invisible semi, a fifty-ton truck going ninety miles an hour, hitting you head-on. And then I was flying through the air, and then I was on fire flying through the air, and then I felt something hit me in the air and smash right through my teeth, then suddenly I heard screams and shouts and my arm felt like a candle, like wax burning at my shoulder. But I kept thinking: Dreamsicle, Dreamsicle. My hair was burning, I smelled it, and I remember thinking how will I find my mother with my arm gone? And then I hit something very hard—and I was knocked out.

  “Well, there’d been an explosion. The ice-cream truck blew up. It blew up because it had a gas-powered generator that had a leak that ran down the gas line from the carburetor and dripped on the muffler and caught fire and blew up the truck’s gas tank. Four people were killed: my mother, the ice-cream man, a little girl, and the crippled boy. I think the crippled boy, but it may not be true. I woke up in the hospital—in a plastic tent, with a strange clear tube full of green liquid where my arm had been. Or maybe there was none. Just air. When I got a little better, the plastic surgeons started. Willis, they’re geniuses. I mean, they worked on me night and day, and look at this miracle—they saved my beauty and actually made me more beautiful than I was before. Though not as beautiful as my poor dead mother—red hair, chocolate-brown eyes. …”r />
  She fished out a pocket mirror and fluffed out the Afro wig, licked her jagged lips, making a kissy-face, smoothing on a little lip gloss. One eye winked at me.

  Then she smiled at me, straight at me; her pinwheel eyes stopped turning. A ray of sun caught her full-face; like the moon she sent the ray back to earth: the scars shone, her eyes held me in an expression so sweet I could see all of it; she was right. In that moment she was beautiful. Iris Moss was the loveliest woman in the world.

  Later that day, on my way to lunch with Page, I thought about her last remark. She’d jumped up suddenly, her hand over one ear.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait—God’s talking to me now.”

  She nodded and smiled a few times. “Okay, okay, right. Wait on killing the president? That’s a joke,” she said aside to me. “But listen.” The fingers grabbed me again. “This one’s for you. … God says letters are a good way to ‘read’ people, to get to know them. Everybody on this earth should have a Letter of Identification to carry around to explain who one is. God knows about the Letters, Digby. The advice is: Don’t let letters keep life away from you. Letters should bring life up close.”

  Six

  WHEN I TOLD Terence I was pregnant it was in an Upper East Side apartment that belonged to two famous midgets. Well, okay, not midgets exactly, but let’s say individuals of limited size. She was a googly-eyed comedienne whose fame dated from live TV variety show days, and he was the tiny producer of very big budget films. Terence was subletting their apartment from Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day, roughly the run, on Broadway, of his role in Tiresias (he called it first and second lead)—a pastiche of the blind hermaphrodite’s wittiest sayings and favorite songs. He was Tiresias Number Four in the long and successful run.

  The apartment was spacious but cluttered, and I never got used to the furniture. The famous midgets had scaled all their Louis Quinze down to a height more comfortable for them, which meant that when persons of normal size sat down, they appeared to be relieving themselves on the Aubusson.